Rakuten pairs data with AI to unlock customer insights and value

The Rakuten Group has more than 1.8 billion members from around the world interacting with its ecosystem of over 70 online services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and communications. Rakuten also operates as a B2B company in numerous ways, including helping more than 57,000 Japanese merchants sell online to Japanese customers; providing e-commerce and advertising solutions to large enterprises in international markets; and building and operating mobile networks.

As Rakuten seeks to provide ever-increasing value to its customers, it’s hard to overstate the importance of data. This includes the vast amounts of transactional and behavioral data from Rakuten’s ecosystem of services, down to internal business data preserved in PDFs or Word documents. “For us, the data asset is the key corporate asset,” said Yusuke Kaji, General Manager of AI for Business at Rakuten Group, Inc. 

With AI, Rakuten is finding innovative ways to leverage this asset: “We believe AI models, such as those developed by OpenAI, are the way to amplify the impact we can make on top of the data,” Kaji said. In partnership with OpenAI, Tokyo-headquartered Rakuten is setting a standard for how companies around the world can approach generative AI initiatives with security and privacy at the forefront. 

Rakuten was quick to get started with OpenAI’s API: They began building with GPT-3.5, and even created their own internal chatbot for employees before the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise.

Rakuten’s goal is to become an “AI empowerment company.” They’re using Code Interpreter and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) with OpenAI’s models to understand and extract value from complex, unstructured data, and the results have empowered customers and businesses in new ways: 

• Previously, users had to wait  days to get a response to a customer service ticket. “By using OpenAI’s API with RAG on our internal knowledge base, we’re now able to respond to and help users automatically,” Kaji said. This innovation has significantly improved response times and efficiency. 

• Few people have time to wade through hundreds of user reviews when they’re shopping, so Rakuten is developing a feature that extracts key topics and summarizes reviews. “This will allow users to access and explore the information in a much more structured way,” Kaji said. 

• Knowledge retrieval has also made a large impact on Rakuten’s B2B business. Rakuten consultants are now empowering merchants and enterprises with actionable insights from the company's wealth of data, such as market analyses and sales trends.

Generative AI is an emerging field, and Japan is also exploring policy questions. Any incidents involving a large company could possibly have a chilling effect on innovation for many years to come. “In Japan, trust is extremely important,” Kaji said. “If lost, it will take a very long time to rebuild that trust.” 

That’s why Rakuten considered it critical to find a partner that took security seriously. After extensive assessments and a thorough due diligence process, they chose to work with OpenAI. 

As Rakuten continues to explore ways to innovate with models and data, they’ve put privacy and security above all else. “In everything we do, we are making sure we have the guardrails in place to the highest standard to protect our users and clients,” Kaji said. 

As Rakuten continues to build with OpenAI’s API, they’re excited about the power of new real-time voice and vision capabilities. For instance, they could create meeting action items, email communications, and multilingual translations on top of internal meeting data that only exists in audio format. Rakuten also sees the potential to build more conversational AI experiences into their ecosystem. It comes back to data: these experiences provide richer data about users’ needs, which in turn leads to even better products. 

“Clicks and impressions are just a proxy of a user’s preference. As we integrate LLMs more into the user experience, we can understand the user’s pain point or preference in a direct way through conversational inputs,” Kaji said. “If we can capture and manage this new type of data well, we can provide a better service.” 

Rakuten is guided by a passion to empower people and society—and in 2024, they can’t imagine achieving their goals without AI. At Rakuten, AI represents a new level of empowerment, for instance, in the way it can help small businesses be competitive in the digital landscape. “As a global innovation leader, we saw it as our responsibility to embrace AI with the objective of creating a better, more optimistic future. OpenAI has been an ideal partner on this journey,” said Kaji.